New Semester Update!

Over the winter break, I took admittedly more of a vacation from my thesis than I was planning on, but now the new semester has started and I've jumped right back into work!

After completing a first draft, I feel much more confident in the direction that my thesis is going, as I've moved on from ideas to more hard data. In writing my proposal I focused a lot on the history and theory of public history and podcasting, and now I have transitioned to focusing on my case studies, BackStory Radio and Dan Carlin's Hardcore History.

In researching and investigating these podcasts, I was fortunate enough to be able to conduct an interview with Dr. Nathan Connolly, one of the four main hosts of backstory radio. Being able to talk directly with someone in the podcasting realm, and even better on one of my case studies, will be an invaluable resource going forward and I am very excited to incorporate it into my work.

Going forward, I will be diving further into my research of these two podcasts and will work to tie together my initial research with the data I am collecting now.

If you give a student a research question, they'll ask for sources and sources and sources...

As the old story goes, if you give a mouse a cookie, he'll ask for milk, and then a straw, and then a napkin, and on and on and on....and this has been what researching for my thesis has been like. A few questions at first have evolved over thirteen weeks into what feels like hundreds, and although I can't answer them all, they have pushed and nudged my thesis into all kinds of different directions.

In the beginning I asked myself, "how do podcasts function in the realm of public history?," and it seemed simple enough. The idea was to figure out what podcasts accomplish, then see if that fits into what public history accomplishes, but I think you can tell where things start getting a little muddy. Public history is something that, through my research, I have come to realize is very malleable and rather undefined. If you break down the term you understand that it quite literally is history, usually applied by historians or academics, made available for the public, but that encompasses so many things! My task then was then not only figuring out the nature of podcasts, but of public history itself.

This has since changed my research from focusing solely on podcasts, their creators, and their applications. It has led me to incorporate ideas on public history; it's history, it's goals, what it is, and what it can be. This is not to say my thesis will now be a manifesto on the nature of public history, but it means that it has gained a more specific angle that I will be approaching the work of podcasts from. This is not so much an evolution of my original question, since it primarily remains the same, but it gives my topic a more defined path to follow. I see it being a lot easier to focus my hundreds of other questions into elements of these two guiding questions: "What are the goals of historically minded podcasts?" and "What are the goals of public history?"

Nice to meet you!

Hello everyone! My name is Alexandra Serpikov and I am currently a fourth year Museum Studies Student here at RIT. I say "currently" because I wasn't always in this program; I originally came to RIT as a Fine Arts Photo major. After almost two years I was introduced to the Museum Studies program through my immersion and fell in love with it, eventually switching over.

For the past few years I have first volunteered, then eventually worked at the Vignelli Center Archives, which has definitely influenced me in the fact that I now want to pursue archival work in the future. In addition to the Vignelli Center during the school year, I have also completed two internships with Eastman Kodak Company, along with a few other RIT Museum Studies students. With Kodak, we worked to create an archive for them to effectively house and organize their historical objects, and in the later part of the internship to help use the archive to further develop other projects. The experience there was very valuable, especially since I was able to see our archive form, and then have another, more critical look back at it upon returning to the project.

This summer I was also extremely lucky to have been able to travel around Europe for a month, having fun and of course visiting plenty of museums and historical sites! My favorite experience was at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and although it may be somewhat controversial to say, my least favorite was the Louvre! Maybe I had bad timing though, and if I'm lucky one day I'll be able to give it another shot.

Since I transferred programs I'm a tad behind, but I hope and plan to graduate in the Spring, and after that, who knows? Grad school is on the mind but nothing has been set in stone for me yet, though maybe through the development of my thesis I will point myself in a more concrete direction.

Below are some photos from my travels this summer of the outside of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, and from inside the museum. This was a sort of dream come true visit for me since I'd always wanted to see Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" in person for some reason, and they had a cool touch-tour rendition of the piece right beside it.

I look forward to this last year and wish everyone the best!

Alexandra Serpikov